Last night I made one of my all-time favorite meals. The problem, of course, is that Tarzan won’t eat it. Because of this, I’ve only made it maybe 3 times since we’ve been married.

*sigh*

This is one of those things, that I can’t fathom why he doesn’t like it. It’s sooooo good. He tried it once and he won’t even bother with it anymore. He had peanut butter and jelly and bacon for dinner instead.

I make it pretty well exactly as written. This time, I used a 12 oz bag of frozen broccoli and cauliflower (I let it thaw in the fridge for a couple days ahead of time, but if you aren’t an obsessive planner like me, I might suggest you zap the veggies in the microwave a few minutes before you add them, otherwise they might not be tender enough for some people) and since I had a can of diced tomatoes that included onion, I didn’t add the onion the recipe calls for. Also, I’ve never seen plain “nacho cheese” soup, but you can find “Fiesta Nacho Cheese” soup usually. I’ve never seen it at Aldi, but you can get it at Wal-Mart.

So… this is what I’ll be eating on the rest of the week. No complaints, it’s really good!

Tarzan announced the other day that he’d like some ham and beans soup.

Anytime he says something like this, what he means is: I want [fill in the blank]. But I don’t want to make it. I want YOU to make it, but I want you to make it the way I would make it, if I were going to make it.

This is exhausting to me, since he and I do not have the same taste in food (have I mentioned that?). He doesn’t want to eat it my way, I don’t want to eat it his way. I feel like whoever’s making it should get to pick. Unless it’s your birthday or you’ve been sick for days and this certain thing, made this certain way, is the only thing that sounds good enough to eat.

*sigh*

The problem with ham and beans is, he likes it soupy. I don’t really like it at all, but if I do have to eat it, I like it a little thicker.

I only tried one other time to do this, but I cheated and used canned beans.

I have carrots and celery left over from making buffalo-chicken chili two weeks ago (which was good, not great – I only used about half the chili sauce and hot sauce it called for, I think I may have undershot it a bit – but I will say it was pretty good over the leftover spaghetti noodles from the week before)… and I have a thing about REALLY wanting to “Use Things Up”, so I decided to try my hand at ham and beans, for real.

I soaked the beans in the crockpot overnight (no, I didn’t turn the crockpot on… duh, I was just saving some bowls to have to wash). In the morning, drained off the water, then threw all of the ingredients in the crockpot and turned that sucker on LOW. It was done in about 6 hours.

Again, in the spirit of wanting to Use Things Up, I have some chicken bullion cubes that just won’t seem to go away, so I’ve been boycotting buying chicken broth until they’re gone. So I just heated 6 cups of water to dissolve 6 cubes, in lieu of using canned chicken broth.

I tried it out a little while ago, I was pleased. I’m trying to stay optimistic… this morning when he saw me assembling the ingredients, Tarzan whined, “I thought you were going to make real ham and bean soup?” (He was alarmed by the presence of bay leaves.)

I’m excited that soon I will be adding my very own, custom-made logo to the blog. I may also be making some color scheme changes. Once I get that all lined out, I plan to take the blog’s Facebook page live as well, which I’m also super-excited about.

I created a design contest on designhill to make the logo. I was apprehensive about it, especially the part where you have to pay up front, not having any idea if you were going to get what you wanted from the service (they do have a money-back guarantee, but I’m always so skeptical). But, I got a lot of really great submissions, and it was a lot of fun! I just now, minutes ago, selected a winner, and we’re in the final revision/ handover stage, so I’ll have to wait and give my final review on the service once it’s all finished, but I don’t anticipate any problems.

So… stay tuned, I can’t wait to see how it will look once it all comes together!

In other news, I subscribe to Amy Lynn Andrews‘ weekly “Userletter”, which is mostly about blogging, but also usually mentions one or two other cool lifestyle tips, etc… I’m really enjoying it. This week’s edition had a link this article about “Keystone Habits”. No spoilers… but I’m feeling pretty smug because I can honestly say I have instituted 5/8 of those habits on a pretty solid basis. I don’t know about #8, though. I’m not sure I would consider willpower a habit? Anyway, it’s worth a read.

Well, let me rephrase that. I don’t think my cooking is the problem. He doesn’t like what I cook. As my friend Lynn would say… “same, same”.

Anyway, as far as meals go, my stand-by Make Tarzan Happy meal is spaghetti. It’s also the best bet for the grandkids, although they are historically much (much much) less picky than Tarzan.

Spaghetti was also one of my favorite things my mom made when I was growing up. I do not like anyone’s spaghetti but my mom’s, except my own (which is just like my mom’s.)

I remember being at a friend’s house for dinner once, and they were having spaghetti! It looked just like the spaghetti I knew and loved, and I helped myself to a nice big plate! I discovered too late that it was full of onions and green peppers! And those chunks of red that looked like tomatoes? Red peppers?! And the sauce tasted… sweet? What in the world?

That was when I first realized that different people make the same dish differently! That wasn’t a concept I was familiar with at the time.

Anyway, I don’t do anything fancy with spaghetti. Just a pound of hamburger meat, a jar of meat sauce from Aldi, and noodles… the thin ones. Our grandkids’ mom says that she spends all day simmering her special spaghetti sauce… and she tries not to get her feelings hurt that her kids appear to prefer my version, made with noticeably less “love”.

The trick is getting the right noodle-to-sauce ratio! I never get it right. What I have to do is make way more noodles than I think, and then add the noodles slowly to the sauce until it looks right. Then I use the remaining noodles for other things (for instance today I ate some cold noodles with my current favorite side dish, a broccoli and mushroom recipe I got from emeals).

So this evening I googled “noodles to pasta sauce ratio”, and according to most sources, the right combination is a pound of pasta to 24 ounces of sauce.

Well, not at the Dalton’s house, it isn’t! That would be waaaaaay too many noodles. This last batch I made I cooked about 10 1/2 ounces of noodles, but probably only used a little over half that.

Oh, and I love the pot-sized spaghetti noodles, when I can find them. You have to really look for them in stores, I always tend to overlook them on the shelves, I guess because the box is a different size/shape than I’m expecting?

Some day, I’ll remember to weigh the uncooked noodles, make a note… then before I add the cooked noodles to the sauce, weigh them… then weigh the remaining unused cooked noodles, once I get the sauce-to-noodle ratio to my taste… and back into the calculation of how many ounces of uncooked noodles that would be.

Yes, that’s the kind of thing I do. For fun.

If you think you know the answer, if you think you know the right number of ounces of uncooked thin spaghetti noodles per 24 ounces of pasta sauce (plus a pound of hamburger meat, if that matters), go ahead and let me know. But know, you’re ruining ALL my fun. 😉

Last Friday night I had big plans to make dinner for Tarzan. It’s always a struggle to find something we both like, we have exactly opposite tastes in food. He doesn’t really like to go out for Mexican food, but now and then I can get him to eat it with minimal complaints if I make it at home. So I put some chicken taco meat in the crockpot that morning. (I used 2.25 pounds of chicken, an entire envelope of taco seasoning, and I didn’t have enough chicken broth so I dissolved some bullion cubes in hot water to make up the difference. Also, when it was done cooking, I shredded the chicken in my KithenAid® mixer, using the dough hook) I planned to make Mexican rice, and had soft tortilla shells and lettuce and tomato on hand, so it would seem more like a “meal” to Tarzan.

But… he had other plans for the evening and didn’t end up being home for dinner. I didn’t make the rice, since that was mostly for him. He won’t eat leftovers so I had an abundance of chicken taco meat on my hands.

I ate chicken soft tacos for dinner Friday, and for lunch and dinner Saturday. When I got back from my trip I had chicken soft tacos for lunch and dinner Wednesday. I had had about enough chicken soft tacos by then, so Wednesday after work I went and got the fixings for Skinny Tortilla Soup, which I made for lunch Thursday. I used bullion cubes for the broth again and I used full-fat cheese (nope, I don’t believe low or reduced fat ingredients are all that much healthier, but that’s just my humble opinion) and I just replaced the 3/4 cup of cubed chicken with the chicken I already had.

I still had about a cup and a half of chicken left, even after making the soup, so I froze the rest of the chicken and put a reminder in my Awesome Note app to remind me in about a month to make a double batch of the soup and use the rest of the chicken up. I do love the soup, it’s one of my favorites, so eating up a double batch won’t take me long at all (I had finished off Thursday’s batch by last night). But… even so, I’m about taco-chickened out! This is what happens when you marry a man who won’t eat leftovers. *sigh*

Tomorrow I start my new job. I spent the day traveling across the country, so I could be where I need to be first thing tomorrow morning.

I’ve had a few people comment that I don’t seem very excited.

It’s true, I’m not. I’m not unexcited (that’s not a word, is it?). I’m just kinda… well, okay, let’s see where this is going.

I suppose part of my apparent apathy can be explained by the fact that I pretty much know what to expect. The work itself is not going to be all that much different.

Another big factor is the fact that I left a good job, where I was reasonably happy. This is the first time I’ve made a job change when it wasn’t blatantly obvious that the change was going to be better for me.

I remember when I was preparing myself for my second interview at my last job. Tarzan and I had not been married very long. I commented to him that “I really want this job.”

He responded that he’d never heard me say that about a job before.

It’s true, I’ve changed jobs… kinda a lot? In the four years we’d been together up until that time, I’d changed jobs twice, which is a lot by most people’s standards, including my own. I remember him being worried that I had changed jobs too often when I was interviewing for that job. I wasn’t the least bit concerned. I was certain I was doing the right thing that time. And I was right.

This time just isn’t so cut and dry. I know I’ll come out okay. I expect it to be better than just “okay”. I just gotta warm up to everything.

I’ve tried to figure out what my dream job would be. In my wildest dreams (well, with the caveat that in my wildest dreams, my dream job is an actual job, and not something like “professional cookie dough taster”) maybe it would be cool to be a private investigator? Catch cheating husbands (and wives) kind of stuff. I can’t really come up with anything that’s feasible to switch to, not this late and life, and not while paying the mortgage.

But I do have a secret talent. I really REALLY kick ass at crossword puzzles.

Well, you know. The ones in the magazine racks at the checkout line. The ones labeled “EZ”, “FUN” and “BIG PRINT”. Not, like, The New York Times ones.

The lady next to me on my second flight had a book of EZ CROSSWORDS. It was painful to me to see that she had incorrectly answered a clue in the upper right corner, and that had caused her to take a few other clues the wrong direction. It was mucking up her whole puzzle.

Now, some people like help with crossword puzzles and some people do not. (I learned this the hard way.) So, I thought I’d ease into it by asking innocently, “Do you… have any particular method to working on crossword puzzles?”

“Oh, no, not really. I just start out with the ones I know and kind of go from there.”

“Ah, I see. I used to do a lot of crossword puzzles when I was a kid.”

“Really?” this perked her interest, “I haven’t ever seen a child do a puzzle like this. How wonderful! I used to be a teacher! How old were you when you starting doing them?”

I didn’t know. All I know is I know all the answers in those EZ books. I once took one to one of Tarzan’s family get togethers, and you would have thought I was doing parlor tricks… the Daltons were quite impressed.

I pointed to the offending answer in her puzzle, “I think that should be ALEE.”

She screwed her face up. I don’t think she believed me, but she erased her wrong answer. “How would you spell that?”

I told her.

“What’s that even mean?” she referred back to the clue: toward shelter.

“It’s some nautical term,” I told her.

She finished that corner of the puzzle. “Do you know this one?”

She pointed to the clue: a man in a cast.

“I think it’s ACTOR.”

She slapped her forehead, “I was thinking like, a leg in a cast!”

I nodded, “It’s all in how you look at it.”

“You’re really smart!”

So. I wonder how you get going in a career solving crossword puzzles? Professionally. Only the EZ ones. The others are above my pay grade, I’m sure.

I need caffeine in the morning. Yes, I know no one “needs” caffeine. I know I *can* do without it. But I don’t wanna.

Years ago, when I was about 50 pounds heavier, I would get up in the middle of the night, go to the refrigerator, and chug a cold can of Coca-Cola, and go right back to bed. I suppose it wasn’t really the caffeine I was after, but rather the sugar. I don’t know how many I would drink on an average day back then, but if I had to guess I think maybe 3-4. Compared to some people’s soda addictions, I guess that wasn’t terrible.

Over the years, I’ve cut way back. But I’ve never been able to completely kick the soda-in-the-morning habit. When Rubies and I were setting up our roommate agreement, I’m pretty sure the first rule was: Don’t drink the last cold Coke. (Also, don’t let us run out of toilet paper.)

Sometime in 2014, I came across the Mountain Dew Kickstart line of soda. I can’t remember what flavor anymore, but it was before they introduced my beloved Limeade. It may have been orange, but that seems wrong, because generally, I hate all things flavored orange (that’s another story, related to years of having to swallow many children’s aspirin on a daily basis most of my childhood). Maybe it was fruit punch, but I’ve never been a huge fan of that either (I think they put orange flavoring in fruit punch… ick.)

I liked it, though, because it didn’t have the aftertaste I usually noticed in artificially sweetened beverages, and a 16-ounce can only had 80 calories. I didn’t like it as much as Coke, but it worked in a pinch. I would grab one now and then when I was at a gas station, but I wasn’t going out of my way to get them.

Then one morning, I noticed a new flavor! Limeade. Prior to this, I was neutral to Mountain Dew. I liked it fine, I might have one if it was offered or if nothing else was available, but it certainly wasn’t my go-to. But I thought I might like it better than whatever flavor I’d been drinking up to this point.

I was addicted within weeks. And they were expensive! And you couldn’t buy them by the carton, only individually – even at Wal-Mart! They were kind of a pain in the ass to come by, actually.

Certain gas stations had them periodically for 99¢. The cashiers at the local Moto-Mart began referring to me as “The Kickstart Lady”. I would come in every weekend and buy up the following week’s supply, making sure I had one for at least every morning I’d be home. I told myself that, if the time came that I couldn’t find them for 99¢, I wouldn’t buy them.

Early mornings, when I was heading to the airport at 4 a.m., I’d scrounge the bottom of my purse for enough change, hands shaking like a crack addict, almost shouting out in joy when I realized I had the $1.89 I’d need to finance my fix. That’s more than the 99¢ budget I’d put myself on, but holy hell, it was 4 a.m.! I’d already been up since 3 a.m.! I deserved it! And it was only 80 calories!

Earlier this year, I started noticing the Limeade flavor being harder and harder to come by. If I found it, I would buy the store out, even if I had a full week’s stock in the fridge already. Something was wrong, I could sense it!

I told Rubies I was having trouble finding it.

She seemed concerned. Gently, she interposed, “I don’t know, Ginger. Maybe this will be a good thing for you.”

For the last two weeks, I’ve been completely unable to find it. I was at a U-Gas when the Pepsi delivery man was there, so I asked him, “Hey, what’s up with the Limeade Kickstart?”

“What’s that? Limeade what?”

“The one in the green can.”

“Hmmm. The only one we have in a green can is, like watermelon.”

“NO NO NO! The one that’s flavored like Mountain Dew. The one in the deep delicious-looking green can!”

“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, they replaced that with Mango-Lime.”

So, my spidey-senses were right…

And according to this, it was discontinued in the United States in March 2017. Now, you can only get in Australia.

I thought about ordering it from Australia, surely there’s a way to do that. But that would be ridiculous.

It WOULD be ridiculous, right? I definitely shouldn’t do that. Right? Right?

With that, I will leave you with my favorite Dan Seals song, which happens to be about a different sort of addiction:

Yesterday as I was archiving old diary entries, I saw that on Friday, April 6, 2007, I made “Italian-style mini-meatloaves” for Rubies and her boys (there were only two of them then!) and Natalie. Here’s the recipe, pulled from kraftrecipes.com:

There’s only one thing as exciting as our Italian-style meatloaf: two of these adorable mini muffin-tin versions. (So, OK, make that two things.)

The best April Fools’ prank I ever played was on my then-husband, in 2001. We were about halfway through our short marriage (we only made it a little over a year). The Saturday night of March 31, he had gone out drinking with a buddy. I don’t recall where I was when he left, but I wasn’t home.

Around 1 a.m. on April 1, I woke up to find he still hadn’t made it home. I slept restlessly the rest of the night, expecting to hear him come stumbling in any minute. I realized around 5 a.m. that he probably wasn’t coming home.

Around 6:30 a.m., I got up. Standing at the screen door, looking out into the driveway, I pondered how mad I should be about the fact that my husband stayed out all night without even bothering to call me. My gaze settled on his prize 1994 Mustang. It was a burnt orange color, with a decal on the back of the tinted glass window, portraying a bucking wild mustang and the words: DRIVE IT LIKE YOU STOLE IT.

And I had an idea.

Around 9:30 a.m., a white Ford truck pulled into the driveway, carrying my hungover husband. I saw it pull up, but I hurried back to the back bedroom and busied myself, pretending to do school work (I was in college at the time).

Eventually, he ventured into the house. Rather boldly, I thought, for a man who had just stayed out all night without so much as courtesy call to his young bride.

I heard him rustling around in the front room, then by and by making his way to the bathroom, and I guess he got a glimpse of me at my desk in the back bedroom, and he started.

“I didn’t think you were home!”

Casually, I looked up, “Where else would I be?”

His eyes widened, “Wait! Where’s the Mustang?”

I raised my eyebrows, “Did you forget where you parked it last night?”

“What do you mean, where I parked it?”

I stood up from the desk, “I assume you drove it home.”

“When? Today?”

“Um, yes, today. What are you talking about?” I forced my face into the most incredulous look I could muster.

“I didn’t drive last night. Jack picked me up!” then I saw a wave of realization cross his face, as he deduced what must have happened, spinning around to run through the house out the door, to the driveway.

I followed after him, calling, “What is your problem?”

“The Mustang! Where is the Mustang?”

Standing in the middle of the driveway, he seemed to be inspecting the gravel, “Was it here when you got home yesterday?”

“No, I thought you drove it to Jack’s.”

“NO! JACK PICKED ME UP. CALL THE POLICE! THE MUSTANG’S BEEN STOLEN.”

He was seriously in despair.

In the corner of my eye, in the upstairs window of the house next door, I saw the curtain move. My neighbor (my accomplice) was watching from above.

Opening the window, she hollered out, “What’s all the commotion about?”

“Gina!” my husband cried to her, “When was the last time you saw my Mustang?”

Gina screwed her face up thoughtfully, “Your orange car?”

“YES, YES MY ORANGE CAR! MY MUSTANG.”

Gina shrugged, “I guess I saw it … yesterday when I got home from work.”

“Well did you see anyone around here? Someone stole my Mustang!”

“Oh, surely not! I would have heard someone if they were here. I mean, you didn’t leave your keys in it or anything, did you?” Gina offered, helpfully.

“Of course I didn’t leave my keys in it!” he turned to me, “Where’s the other set of keys?”

I nodded towards the house, “On the hook by the door, like they always are.”

“Call the police!” he repeated, as he began pacing the driveway, inspecting the gravel, “Do you see any unusual tire tracks?” he asked Gina.

“You want me to call the police?” I asked him.

“Well, I don’t know what else to do!”

“Well, why don’t you call the police? Do you not know how to use a phone?”

“Ginger! Just call the damn police!” he snapped.

“I just wondered. Maybe the reason you didn’t call me to tell me you were going to stay out all night was because you don’t know how to use a phone?”

“Waylon stayed out all night?” Gina piped in.

“Ginger, can you worry about that later! MY MUSTANG’S BEEN STOLEN!”

Gina giggled.

Calmly, I said to him, “Waylon, do you even know what day it is?”

He squinted at me, “It’s Sunday. What’s your point?”

“But do you know the date?”

Waylon sighed, “Ok, I’ll call the police my damn self!”

As he was heading to the house, Gina called out the window, “Wait, think about this a minute, Waylon! What’s today’s date?”

“I don’t know what that has to do with any fucking thing!”

The screen door slammed.

Gina, laughing, stage-whispered to me, “You better tell him before he actually calls the police!”

I ran after him, now on the verge of laughter myself, finding him rummaging through the a kitchen drawer, fishing out the phone book. “Do I call the non-emergency number, you think?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know if the police department is open today. You know, it being a holiday and all,” I informed him.

“What holiday is it?”

“It’s April First. It’s April Fools’ Day. And your car has not been stolen. Gina and I took it and hid it at my mom’s house. And you, my dear, are an April Fool!”

While this was processing, I added, “And next time you’re going to stay out all night? Your ass better call your wife.”